Texas: WAY COOLER THAN MINNESOTA AND OHIO

[Shit Dickface]

One of them gets more screen time than the other and the other gets lumped in with tinfoil hat types but sure, it does swing both ways.

Yep. There's a huge gap in how each one is treated as far as credibility is concerned.

[Captain Russ]

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[BillyG]

HUGEWHITEBOX

[BillyG]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...n/7495177.html

If NW Houston/Harris County was incorporated it would be the 6th largest city in the nation.

I abhor NW Harris County. It is absolutely everything wrong with suburbs and lacks any kind of planning. The traffic issues they talk about in the article do it no real justice. What a miserable part of town.

[B_Metal]

God just thinking about 290 makes me want to go into a murderous rage.

[Matt]

I miss Spring Branch and Cy Fair. Those years in the 80s were very good to me.

[BillyG]

Spring Branch is still fine, that's where I live now. Cy-Fair is fucking horrible. I graduated from Cy-Fair HS in 99, and I was lucky. 99 was when that area REALLY started the boom, and it has been a fast slide into hell for that whole area. Being in Spring Branch I recently hopped on 290 to take it to Cypress for my sister's birthday dinner. I wanted to fucking rage and start shooting people. It would have been better, and faster, to go out of my way to go FAR WEST to Katy, then drive north on surface streets to Cypress, than just taking 290.

Houston lacks a good transit system, which for the most part isn't horrible thanks to an incredible highway system that makes it pretty painless to get around...except 290. If you have to drive on 290 you're killing yourself.

[B_Metal]

290 is like instant serial killer material. Worst highway/road/torture device ever created.

[Matt]

Wow...bear in mind, my memories of Spring Branch and Cy-Fair come from the early 80s. As I recall, Cy-Fair felt 'newer' than Spring Branch. I was going to the fairly new jr. high school when we moved back to MN.

Anyways...good memories. I had a TON of really, really good friends down there that I've lost contact with.

[BillyG]

Cy-Fair is certainly newer than Spring Branch, Spring Branch was built in the 30s/40s and really exploded when GIs came back from WW2. but Spring Branch/Memorial was built as an extension of the city of Houston, ie: grid patterns and roads that make sense. There's a couple congestion spots (Bunker Hill, I'm looking at you!) but that is more due to a concentration on retail that poor planning.

Cy-Fair didn't have their first homes built until the 1970s, but the bottom fell out quick when oil went bust in the 80s. Development slowed down until the late 80s, but so many developers had bought land in NW Harris County that no solid planning was done (also no incorporated areas didn't help) and you have to this day tons of different developers creating their personal little pockets and it all adds up to a stitched together fucked up part of town. Up near Klein was until right around 2000 one of the more preferred suburbs, but now it's literally two decent neighborhoods surrounded by poverty and traffic (pollution).

I've been banging the drum to my friends and family for a while now, and these types of things make me feel vindicated, but the outlying suburbs are NOT the place to be in Houston (and I'm sure other places). They've quickly become the least attractive destinations to live. Not even Cy-Fair schools are a selling point anymore, as in my older post about the school system failures.

[Matt]

I remember that housing bust in the 80s. When we moved up here, we just flat out MOVED up here...walked away from the house. I remember going with my dad to stop payment on his final mortgage check before we left town, lol.

[BillyG]

Yeah, we moved back and forth between Houston and DFW until things settled down and got back to normal here.

I'd recommend going on Google Maps and street viewing your old haunts in Cypress. It's incredible what's happened in literally 3-5 years, let alone the last 15.

[Abraham Smashington]

NO GOOD TEXAS


THIS IS BETTER

[BillyG]

So we are in the midst of the worst drought in 90 years. Every county save two in the state has wild fires. Rick Perry took to the airwaves talking about how the fires are out of control and the state cannot handle the fires itself and needs federal assistance.

OH RICK PERRY YOU SO CRAZY

[Nathan]

You can have all of this rain that you need.